Sunday, 21 October 2012

What's Wrong With WvW : GW2

As a drop-in knockabout romp it does the job. As a tournament that makes sense? Not so much.

Many hardened RvR players will be chorusing "We told you so" but while the problems they anticipated - lack of meaning or worthwhile goals, small maps, ease of travel and so on - do exist, they seem to me to be the kind of things that would go largely unnoticed by the interested but less-committed majority.

What no-one can help but notice are the wildly uneven matches. So far I believe we have one good round:

How It Should Look

Last week, despite a good start we were steamrolled by Sanctum of Rall. This shot comes from mid-week, when for a brief time they spectacularly owned every single structure on all four maps. By the end of the week they were only just shy of 500,000 points.

How It Looked Last Week

This week once again we're off to a good start and this time it looks as though we will carry on that way. Poor old Gates of Madness face a second week confined to barracks, although in my opinion it's actually more fun being in their position than it is owning 95% of everything. Nowhere near as much fun as an even match, but at least the underdog can snap and snarl. The top dog has nothing much to do but sleep all week.

How It Looks This Week

Everyone knows what the problems are:

Free Server Transfers

Orb Bonus For World That Needs It Least

Ladder-Style Server Matching System

Night Capping (not as much fun as it sounds)

Free Server Transfers should stop when Guesting comes in. That really needs to happen. Like yesterday.

The Orb bonus is a crazy idea to begin with. So, your team is the strongest? Why, here you are then, have this thing that makes you stronger still! There needs to be a reason to take the Orbs but that isn't it.

Ladder-Style rankings might be okay if there was a prospect of Servers actually getting better. Not sure how realistic that is. Maybe Divisions would work better, with promotions and relegations?